Unit 16 · Comparison

Scholars of comparative religion warn about a common mistake. A reader finds a familiar idea in a strange text and assumes it means the same thing. Suffering in the Dhammapada, suffering in Job and suffering in the Daodejing are not one idea in three costumes. Each belongs to a different worldview with its own terms, stories and aims.

So the method has steps. First, read each text in its own terms: its key words, its setting and how its own community reads it. Second, name the question each text is asking. Third, only then compare: note real similarities, real differences, and places where the same English word covers different ideas. This is sometimes called comparing without collapsing.

Comparison also needs a stance. This course does not rank traditions or decide which diagnosis of suffering is true. It describes what each text says and how its readers take it. Scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith argued that comparison is always done for a purpose chosen by the comparer. Naming that purpose is part of honest comparison.

The story of Kisa Gotami comes from the Pali commentaries, especially on Dhammapada verse 114 and on her verses in the Therigatha, the verses of the elder nuns. Burlingame translated the Dhammapada version in 1921. The Buddha, as the story presents him, does not argue with her grief. He gives her a task that lets her discover something.

What she finds is that death is universal. No household is untouched. In Buddhist terms, she sees anicca, impermanence, and dukkha, the suffering tied to it. The story frames her change not as forgetting her son but as seeing clearly. Her own verses in the Therigatha describe her grief and her later freedom.

The cure the story names is not the return of her son. It is understanding, followed by the path. Buddhist teachers use the story at funerals and in grief counseling today. Some modern readers find it harsh; others find it deeply kind, since the Buddha lets her learn the truth for herself rather than lecturing her.

The Upanishads are Hindu scriptures, the oldest composed c. 800 to 500 BCE, some likely before the Buddha on most scholars’ dates. They ask what lies behind the world and behind the person. Their answer centers on atman, the true self, and brahman, the ultimate reality. Several Upanishads teach that atman and brahman are one.

In the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7), the teacher Uddalaka tells his son Shvetaketu, ’you are that’, tat tvam asi. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.4.5), a person is said to become what they desire and act on. Bondage to samsara, the cycle of rebirth, comes from desire and ignorance. Release, moksha, comes from knowing the self.

Here the comparison needs care. Both the Upanishads and the Buddhist texts speak of desire, karma, rebirth and release. But the Upanishads find freedom in knowing the true self, while the Buddhist suttas teach anatta, that no aggregate is a self. Readers in both traditions have argued about this contrast for over two thousand years.

The Bhagavad Gita is a Hindu scripture of 700 verses in the Mahabharata epic, composed roughly between the second century BCE and the second century CE, on common scholarly estimates. The warrior Arjuna, facing his own relatives in battle, collapses in grief. His charioteer, Krishna, whom the Gita reveals as God, teaches him.

Krishna’s teaching on suffering has several strands. The self, he says (2.22), puts on new bodies as a person puts on new clothes; it is not killed when the body is killed. One has a right to action but not to its fruits (2.47): act without attachment to results. And devotion, bhakti, to Krishna leads beyond sorrow.

Compared with the Buddhist texts, the Gita shares the idea that attachment binds and that one can act without clinging. It differs on the self, which it calls eternal, and on the role of a personal God. Some modern readers, such as Gandhi, read the Gita’s battle as an inner struggle; others read it more literally. Hindu traditions hold many readings.

Some terms are shared across Indian traditions, and this makes comparison easy to get wrong. Take karma. In the older Vedic texts, karma meant ritual action, especially sacrifice. In the Upanishads and later Hindu texts, it came to mean action and its results over lives. In the Buddhist texts, the Buddha, as the suttas present him, defines karma as intention (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63).

Take dharma. In Hindu texts such as the Gita, dharma often means duty, the right action for one’s role and stage of life; Arjuna’s dharma as a warrior is to fight. In Buddhist texts, dhamma most often means the Buddha’s teaching, or the truth it points to, and in the Abhidhamma a basic event of experience.

So a sentence like ’both traditions believe in karma and dharma’ is true only at the level of words. The meanings differ in ways that matter to each tradition. Careful comparers mark this with a gloss each time: karma as intention (Buddhist), dharma as duty (Gita). It is the same care this course asks for with any shared term.

The Book of Job, in the Hebrew Bible, opens with a prose tale. Job is righteous. A figure called the satan, the accuser, suggests to God that Job is good only because he is blessed. Job loses his children, his wealth and his health. He curses the day he was born, but he does not curse God.

His friends offer an explanation: God is just, so Job must have sinned. Job refuses. He insists on his innocence and demands a hearing. In chapters 38 to 41, God answers from a whirlwind. God does not explain Job’s suffering. Instead God asks: where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? At the end, God says the friends have not spoken rightly, as Job has.

Jewish and Christian readers have read Job in many ways: as a lesson in trust, as a protest the book honors, as a statement that human beings cannot grasp divine purposes. The cause of suffering is left open; the book rejects one answer. The response it models is honest speech to God and, at last, a changed view of one’s place in the world.

Ecclesiastes, or Qoheleth, the Teacher, is a book of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. Its refrain is famous. The King James Version renders it: vanity of vanities; all is vanity. The Hebrew word is hevel, which means breath, vapor or mist. Many modern translators render it fleeting or meaningless.

The Teacher observes that the sun rises and sets, the rivers run to the sea, and nothing is new under the sun. Wealth, wisdom and work do not last. The wise and the fool die alike. There is a time for everything (3:1-8): to be born and to die, to weep and to laugh. Suffering here comes from the passing of all things and the limits of human knowing.

Readers have noticed a likeness to anicca, Buddhist impermanence. But the responses differ. Ecclesiastes advises enjoying food, work and companionship as gifts of God, and ends by urging readers to fear God and keep the commandments. It does not offer release from rebirth. The shared observation leads to a different path.

The Daodejing, a Chinese text of 81 short chapters traditionally credited to Laozi, was probably compiled around the fourth or third century BCE. It speaks of the Dao, the way, the source and pattern of all things, which cannot be fully named. Suffering in this text comes largely from striving, grasping and forcing things against their nature.

Chapter 44 asks which is dearer, fame or oneself, and says those who know when enough is enough suffer no disgrace. Chapter 76 notes that the living are soft and supple, the dead stiff and hard. The response is wu wei, often rendered non-action or effortless action: acting in harmony with the Dao rather than against it.

Readers often place the Daodejing beside Buddhist texts, and Chinese Buddhists did so for centuries; early translators even used Daoist words for Buddhist ideas. But the Daodejing speaks of returning to the root, not of ending rebirth. Its sage lives fully in the world. The likeness of simplicity and letting go sits beside real differences in goal.

Once each text is read on its own, a chart can help. Across the top: text, what suffering is, its cause, its cure, and the goal. Down the side: the Buddhist suttas, the Upanishads, the Gita, Job, Ecclesiastes and the Daodejing. The chart makes patterns visible, but it also flattens. Each cell is a summary, not the text.

Some parallels stand out. Several texts link suffering to desire or grasping: the suttas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the Daodejing. Several observe that everything passes: the suttas and Ecclesiastes. Some differences are just as clear. Job and Ecclesiastes speak within a relationship with God. The suttas and Daodejing do not center a creator. The Upanishads and Gita affirm a lasting self; the suttas do not.

The chart can also show a surprise. Job alone refuses to name a cause and treats the demand for an explanation as part of the story. That makes Job closer, in one way, to the poisoned arrow parable, which also sets aside some questions. A careful comparer notes such unexpected resonances without pressing them into sameness.

Daniel’s final essay does not say Kisa Gotami’s story is wiser than Job’s, or the reverse. It says that both stories face the death of children and both change the sufferer. Kisa Gotami’s story names impermanence and offers a path of understanding. Job names no cause, rejects a false one, and ends in an encounter with God.

He supports each claim with a citation: the Dhammapada commentary on verse 114 in Burlingame’s translation; Job 38 in a named translation. He attributes each belief: Buddhists read Kisa Gotami’s story as teaching that death is universal; Jewish and Christian readers have read Job in several ways. He never writes as if one tradition’s view is simply true.

This is the model for the unit. Comparing without ranking is not the same as saying all traditions teach the same thing. It is closer to the opposite. It takes each tradition seriously enough to let its differences stand. A reader learns more from the contrast than from a forced synthesis.

The five precepts, pancasila, are recited by lay Buddhists across the Theravada world and taken in some form in most Buddhist traditions. Each begins with the same Pali words: I undertake the training rule to refrain from. Then: taking life; taking what is not given; sexual misconduct; false speech; and intoxicants that cause heedlessness.

The form matters. The precepts are not stated as commands from a god. Each is a sikkhapada, a training step, which the speaker undertakes. Buddhists often take them at a temple, repeating them after a monk, and may renew them when they break them. They are understood as a commitment to train, not as a law handed down.

The fifth precept is distinctive. It targets alcohol and drugs because they lead to heedlessness, which makes breaking the other four more likely. Buddhist teachers explain it through the Dhammapada’s praise of heedfulness. Some traditions interpret it strictly as total abstinence; some lay communities keep it more loosely. Practice varies across countries and families.

The Ten Commandments appear in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish and Christian traditions number them in slightly different ways. They open with God’s self-introduction: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. The first commandments concern God: no other gods, no images, not taking God’s name in vain, keeping the Sabbath.

The later commandments overlap with the precepts: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness. The last, do not covet, turns inward toward desire, which invites comparison with the Buddhist emphasis on craving. The Commandments also include honoring parents, which the precepts do not list but other Buddhist texts praise.

The differences are in form and source. The Commandments are given by God within a covenant with Israel. The precepts are undertaken by a person as training, with no divine lawgiver. The Commandments center on God and neighbor; the precepts center on harm and the mind. Priya’s chart shows the overlap, but it cannot show these frames unless she adds a column.

In the Anguttara Nikaya (6.63), the Buddha, as the sutta presents him, says: intention, I tell you, is karma. Having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind. The Pali word is cetana, will or intention. This line shapes the whole of Buddhist ethics. What matters most is the mind behind an act.

The Cakkhupala story from Unit 13 shows this in practice. The blind monk killed insects without knowing, and the Buddha, in the story, finds no fault. The Vinaya also judges many offenses by intent. A monk who kills by accident is treated differently from one who kills on purpose.

Comparison helps here. Jewish law also weighs intent: the Torah distinguishes accidental from deliberate killing and sets up cities of refuge (Numbers 35). Kant, in modern European ethics, placed the good will at the center. Buddhist ethics is not unique in valuing intent, but it makes intention the very definition of karma, which gives it a distinctive shape. Scholars such as Damien Keown have analyzed this in detail.

Ahimsa means non-harming or nonviolence. It appears across the traditions of ancient India. In Buddhist texts it stands behind the first precept. In Jain texts it is the first and greatest vow. In Hindu texts such as the Yoga Sutras (2.30), it is the first of the yamas, the restraints, and the Mahabharata calls it the highest dharma in several passages.

The Jain tradition, taught by Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha, carries ahimsa furthest. The Acaranga Sutra teaches that all beings with life, down to insects and beings in earth and water, should not be harmed. Jain monastics sweep their path and may cover their mouths so as not to harm tiny creatures. Jain lay ethics shapes diet, trade and daily life.

Buddhist practice is often less strict than Jain practice. The Vinaya allowed monks to eat meat offered to them if they had not seen, heard or suspected that the animal was killed for them. Many Mahayana traditions, drawing on texts like the Lankavatara Sutra, urge vegetarianism; Chinese and Vietnamese monastics are usually vegetarian. The Gita, in turn, treats a warrior’s fighting as dharma. The principle is shared; its application differs.

Chapter 10 of the Dhammapada, on punishment, opens with a pair. Verse 129, in Muller’s rendering: all men tremble at punishment, all men fear death; remember that you are like unto them, and do not kill, nor cause slaughter. Verse 130 repeats the form: all men love life.

The argument is simple and strong. It does not appeal to a command. It asks the reader to compare themselves with others. I fear death; so do they. Therefore I should not kill or cause killing. Scholars call this kind of principle reciprocity: treat others as you would be treated, because you share their nature.

Many traditions have a version. Rabbi Hillel, around the first century BCE, summed up the Torah this way: what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow (Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Jesus, in Matthew 7:12, gives the positive form: do to others what you would have them do to you. Readers often call these the Golden Rule. The Dhammapada ties it specifically to fear of death and to not killing.

The Analects collect sayings of Confucius (551 to 479 BCE, traditional dates) and his students. In 15.24, a student asks if there is one word that can guide one’s whole life. Confucius answers: shu, reciprocity or consideration. What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.

The line looks like Hillel’s and the Dhammapada’s. But the setting differs. Confucian ethics centers on ren, humaneness, practiced within relationships: parent and child, ruler and minister, older and younger. Filial piety, ritual propriety (li) and learning shape the good life. The Analects say little about rebirth or release; the goal is a harmonious family and state.

So Priya’s grid shows why the surprise happened. The Confucian column has no list of five prohibitions, because Confucian ethics works through roles and cultivation rather than rules. Chinese Buddhists in later centuries often combined the two: keeping the precepts while honoring Confucian family duties. Reading the Analects in its own terms explains the empty boxes.

The Metta Sutta (Sutta Nipata 1.8) is one of the most chanted texts in Theravada Buddhism. It describes the loving-kindness a person should develop: may all beings be happy and secure. Its central image is a mother who protects her only child with her life. So, the sutta says, one should cultivate a boundless heart toward all beings.

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 to 7), Jesus teaches: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (5:44), so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good. Christians have read this as the heart of Jesus’s ethics. Both texts extend love beyond family and friends to all, even enemies.

The frames differ. The Metta Sutta describes a practice of cultivating a state of mind, linked to the path and, in Theravada reading, to meditation. The Sermon grounds love in imitation of God the Father. Both are described here, not practiced. Comparing them shows a shared stretch toward universal love, reached by different roads.

Every ethical tradition has an ideal person. In Mahayana Buddhism, it is the bodhisattva, one who vows to reach awakening for the sake of all beings. Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara (c. 700 CE) expresses the vow in moving verses: may I be a protector for the unprotected, a guide for travelers, a boat for those who wish to cross. The bodhisattva practices the perfections, above all compassion and wisdom.

In the Analects, the ideal is the junzi, often translated gentleman or exemplary person. The junzi is humane, loyal, learned and correct in ritual. Analects 4.16 says the junzi understands what is right, while the petty person understands profit. The junzi’s field of action is family, community and government.

Set side by side, the two share selflessness and service. They differ in scope and goal. The bodhisattva’s horizon is all beings over countless lives, aimed at awakening. The junzi’s is human society in this life, aimed at harmony. In China, many people honored both ideals at once, which is itself a fact worth noting.

Priya’s finished chart has a pattern. Killing, stealing and lying are forbidden or discouraged in every tradition she studied. Most regulate sexual conduct. Many share a form of reciprocity. Scholars of comparative ethics note such overlaps widely, and some argue they reflect common human needs for trust and safety.

It also has surprises. Only the Buddhist list names intoxicants. Only the Commandments begin with duties to God. The Jain vows extend non-harm the furthest. The Confucian column works through relationships, not rules. And the Buddhist column keeps returning to intention, cetana, as the core of ethics.

Priya decides her thesis. The rules look alike, but the reasons differ: covenant, training, empathy, cultivation of virtue, harmony with others. The reasons shape how each tradition handles hard cases, such as war, diet or accidental harm. Her essay attributes each reason to its tradition and ranks none of them.

Take war. The first precept forbids taking life, and many Buddhist teachers read this as ruling out killing in war. Yet Buddhist societies have fought wars, and some Buddhist leaders have supported them. Scholars such as Brian Victoria documented Zen leaders’ support for Japanese militarism, and some Sri Lankan monks backed the war against the Tamil Tigers. Other Buddhists strongly opposed both.

Other traditions have their own reasoning. The Gita frames Arjuna’s fight as dharma. Christian thinkers from Augustine on developed a just war tradition; others, like the Mennonites, practice pacifism. Jain teaching discourages all violence but allows lay defense in some views. Confucian texts discuss when rulers may use force against tyranny.

Studying hard cases shows why comparison must reach past the rules. Each tradition’s reasons open some paths and close others. And each tradition contains debate. A careful student describes the texts, the arguments and the range of positions, and attributes each one, without deciding the case for any tradition.